MIT says it is trying to make design changes to military drones that will enable the aircraft to recognize the hand gestures of flight crew assigned to guide them on to the deck of aircraft carriers.

The Navy has long-term plans to add robotic drones to carrier air wings, and Northrop Grumman's San Diego operation has has been doing work on a prototype of the plane known as the X-47B.

To one degree or another, carrier crews have been using hand gestures to land manned aircraft since the 1920s, when the Navy's first carrier, the Langely, began operating out of San Diego. But operational protocol for carrier-based drones is just now emerging.

MIT says in a background paper that developing hand gestures that would be recognized by sensors on the drone would be complicated -- but do-able."

"The problem of interpreting hand signals has two distinct parts," says MIT. "The first is simply inferring the body pose of the signaler from a digital image: Are the hands up or down, the elbows in or out? The second is determining which specific gesture is depicted in a series of images. The MIT researchers are chiefly concerned with the second problem; they present their solution in the March issue of the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. But to test their approach, they also had to address the first problem, which they did in work presented at last year’s IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition."

Yale Song, an MIT doctoral student, says the institute has been making progress. But he also says in the background paper is the dynamic nature of human hand gestures.

Says Songs: "The main challenge in classifying the signals, the sequence of body positions — is continuous: Crewmembers on the aircraft carrier’s deck are in constant motion. The algorithm that classifies their gestures, however, can’t wait until they stop moving to begin its analysis. “We cannot just give it thousands of [video] frames, because it will take forever."